January 18, 2008

MOSS 2007 has improved its "Add Web Parts" menu by showing lists and libraries for the current site at the top of the menu – no more need to scroll through the alphabetical list to find the site-specific web part you want to add. However, this is only the case for team or "system" sites. The web part menu for Publishing sites displays "Suggested Web Parts for Top Zone," which means you have to go to the Advanced Web Part Gallery and wade through the list of all web parts for your list or library, just as in SPS 2003.

This functionality is coded at the Zone level (in the same way that the Chrome Type default is set at the zone level) and cannot be changed in Site Settings; but there is an easy change you can make in SharePoint Designer so that the web part menus on publishing pages will act the same way as they do on team / system sites.

Open the home page in SharePoint Designer (check out if necessary), and change the property "QuickAdd-ShowListsAndLibraries" from "false" to "true." You may want to change this for more than one zone, in which case you could do a find and replace for the property for all zones. The code section where this property appears is shown below. Just save your page (and check back in if necessary), and you're done.

My colleague Tim just brought this issue to my attention – the inability to attach a file to a blog post in SharePoint (MOSS 2007).

Attachments are part of the blog functionality – they are enabled by default in List Settings:

In addition, there is an "attachment" column built in to the list, which can be displayed in a view. But the New Item and the Edit Item forms do not have the "Attach File" link:

I tried the trick of choosing "attach file" on another list to see if I could copy and paste that function from the URL, but it doesn't work that way – the URL stays the same as the form name as you go through the browse and attach procedure.

I then email-enabled the blog, and my colleague sent a test email with an attachment. This worked, but the attachment is only viewable in Edit mode, which means only for those with Contribute rights. The image below shows the default blog view for a contributor, and you can see that there is no intuitive way to access the attachment.

Here's the post in Edit mode:

For someone with only Read rights, there is no way to access the attachment at all.

This situation is not in the list of issues addressed with the application of SP-1. It seems strange that the developers left the functionality in the list but provided no user-friendly way to access it. There must be a good reason…?

The workaround is to use a document library, and link to documents within the blog post rather than attaching them.